10pm

Yesterday was the Art School Galleries of the Future Conference at AUCB.

In the morning I was working in the cloakroom which was a great opportunity to meet the speakers and delegates. One of the most interesting characters of the day was Professor Richard Demarco. When he arrived there was a lot of hugs and shrieks of delight, but I just took the coats and looked on as his adoring fans flocked to him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Demarco

Later, in the lecture theatre I’d sat with diligence and respect whilst the learned and experienced art school gallery managers shared their practices and observations with us. It was a great insight into current state of affairs but I’d missed a lot of it because I was working.

Then just before lunch I had a chance to sneak in and get a seat. Mr Demarco got up. I’d been told about him by Ronnie on Friday. His eyes were bright and wide as he made his way over and back across the floor. He spoke directly to the audience with the love of a grandfather. he spoke of his conversations with Bueys his love on Edinburgh and it’s castle and festival. He was funny. Every other line was a dry witty remark, but at the base of it he wanted to drive home a message. Stuff could happen, if we want it to. In fact whatever we wanted could happen if we work together.

The day continued, I caught glimpses of projects in Plymouth and Newcastle as well as a commercial gallery based in York who were aligned with York St John. They’d taken a different approach and hung Dali prints in their gallery/cafe which seemed to encourage investment in the work of the artists who were based at the 40 studio spaces which were also on site.

Plymouth College of Art

http://gallery.plymouthart.ac.uk/about.php

Gallery North

http://gn.northumbria.ac.uk/

Bar Lane Studios

http://www.barlanestudios.com/gallery.php

After the formalities there was a reception in The Gallery we cracked open the wine. Most people had left by now because of travel arrangements but Mr Demarco was still there, chatting with everyone, complimenting the curator, saying how great everyone was. By now we’d had a visit from the caretakers shaking their keys so I made an effort to arrange taxi’s and see that everyone was escorted to their cars.

Being an intern at The Gallery at AUCB has been great, but seeing how all these other galleries value interns has made me realise it’s worth out there. Their programmes are generally on the side of avant-garde. The gallery managers and the curators they work with are interested in pushing things and the incentive is education. In the main they sit in the marketing dept. This means that they are usually about creating a credible reputation for the art school there are connected to to attract new students.

What I managed to catch on Saturday was a tiny slice of the range of art school galleries in the UK. And according to Demarco were decades behind those in the US. As an artist this has opened up the idea of working with these potential venues research for presenting research based work.

I was speaking to a visitor called Jerry or maybe Gerry on Thursday. He was saying about why he couldn’t make the launch party. It was because he had gone to see his 11 year old grand-daughter dancing at the Royal Ballet.

Sarah was eleven the youngest there..It came up about stories in the news or maybe heard on the radio that the principal dancer at the Royal Ballet had resigned this week.

http://www.app.com/article/20120126/NJENT08/301260…

We pondered this for a while, wondered how it could have come about. Gerry said he might be off to become a tattoo artist. Simon suggested that maybe he’d had enough of the pressure and just wanted a regular life. I wondered what was happening in New York. I heard on the news a while ago about strikes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/music/city-…

Gerry was here to see the exhibition and asked me where all the paintings were. There was one painting in the room. It took up the entire wall. I hadn’t painted anything. I suppose that is because I am a sculptor. I know this. But as Simon pointed out Picasso sculpted and painted and I remember seeing a body of work which was entirely composed of faces on ceramic bowls and vessels.

Maybe I am not as diverse as Picasso. I have made prints. I did a residency at Leeds College of Art and Design a few years ago where I spent 6 months in the print studio. I eventually got the hang of it. In the end I quite enjoyed it. But no painting for me as yet. Do I event have paint anymore? I definitely have a handful of brushes. I think when I lost that really nice watercolour set after Limavady I was really upset and never really got over it.

Anyway, so Gerry and the paintings. In a winding tackful way I said I was kinda over the modernist ideal and that I was in no position to present him with a masterpiece in oil or marble and that the best I could do with the resources I had was provide a platform for dialogue. Maybe something would come out of it, maybe not but that is wasn’t up to me to provide a finite.

I don’t know how this went down. I needed a break anyway because we just had created 10 Mutoscope animations in collaboration with a group of primary school kids. Well we kinda pointed them in a direction and they just ran away with it. They’d made up some crazy funny stories about Borris the mouse who stole things like pencils and bits of plastic for fun. He slept in a bed shaped like a chariot which he accessed through a hole in the floor. There was also Lost Larry, and a guy who was really tall and used this to see in peoples gardens, a flesh eating monster and a space ship that also worked in water.

The challenge for me when working with young people is not to oversimplify things. To tell it how it is but use simple words. Sometimes when trying to find the right word the idea can get a little lost so when I was taking about ‘Unnamed (System)” which was inspired by the celebrating weighing I kinda lost the plot a bit and so I just left it hanging in the air. The kids were cool about this but I felt that I could have done better with that one.

Never mind life goes on. It’s not a static object, it is just evidence of a conversation which when you try to remember it comes out differently. It’s probably better this way.

BTW Jonathan who had just come back from NYC had the lowdown on the scene there. Although 6 protesters had been arrested. It seems it was full of life in the museums and commercial galleries.

http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/World/Sto…

The show is up at the Old School Room, Phase Two has been handed in and things are underway with the urban sculpture garden in Branksome.

It’s pre- Phase Three, the final stage of my masters studies. Last phase I didn’t do myself justice. The shock of having my work assessed by a university really threw me. Well that along with almost being evicted because the landlady didn’t pay her mortgage.

I was struck with inertia for most of the time. I lost track of making and as to writing I just couldn’t put anything together. Knowing that all of this mattered; this was my first qualification in Fine Art and being aware I was letting it slip out of my hands just made it all worse and perpetuated the spiral of negativity.

I kind of pulled it together by going back to Polymer. I feel at home there, accepted and I work hard when I am there. This time I set myself an unachievable goal. To make a mutoscope in less that three weeks. Of course I did not complete it and the object that I created seemed to be proof to myself that I was incapable of achieving anything.

At the time I was reading a book published by the Whitechapel Gallery in their series on documents of contemporary art. This one was titled Failure. During making I listened to recordings of myself taking to school children about the idea of failure and all the while I was producing something that I knew was destined to fail, in that it would not be a functioning mutoscope.

Perhaps there is the argument, as there was in the book, that failure is something we must embrace and that if you are not failing you’re taking it too easy. I certainly wasn’t taking the easy route going to Polymer. Everything is harder in a factory with no heating and shared showers. You have to rely on everyone else for materials, tools, access to resources. Even to make a cup of tea you have to go and fill a bucket with water.

It’s not the first time I’ve ‘failed’ . A few years ago I made a year long project on rejection after I failed to secure funding for a project.

Perhaps I knew when I began my investigation into making a photographic document of the process of making the document that the outcome was unpredictable.

Is this why my work feels better when it involves participation? By involving others it creates certain unpredictability. You can always rely on people to behave unexpectedly. By asking people to be involved in making my work either through contribution of information, like at Show and Tell, action like in Invitation to Shred or materials like in the Fine Art of Rejection in each case it the outcome open and unpredictable.

Phase two taught me that I need to continue to write and to research and from there the making will come. I am never satisfied with the things I make by myself. They lack something. They lack any sort of connection, they are contrived and awkward. I am always impressed by what I can facilitate in others, what I can instigate.

At the beginning of this process I wanted to delve into dialogical practice and ‘relational aesthetics’ and somehow I got distracted because I was isolated and I tried to impress by making clever art. Now that I have learned some new skills in early photography which I feel compliment my current skills I know that I can learn new skills but how I apply them should embrace chance, or more correctly acceptance of unpredictability and the best way I can do this is by re-appropriating these processes to create a different object determined by the circumstances it is placed into.